2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

For well over a decade, there have been numerous critiques of the social/technical dualism present in engineering education and calls to disrupt it (Faulkner, 2007). Researchers have varying motivations for this focus, including to better prepare students for engineering practice, which is inherently sociotechnical (Leydens & Lucena, 2017); to increase the sense of belonging of historically excluded students, who are more likely to be interested in the social aspects (Malazita & Resetar, 2019); and to create better societal outcomes (Cech, 2013; Pawley, 2019; Riley, 2017). Attempts to disrupt the social/technical dualism have included revising stand-alone ethics courses and adding more social components to previously purely technical courses, such as design courses (Claussen et al., 2019; Gupta, 2017; Hess & Fore, 2018; Salzman & Winiecki, 2019).

This study is part of a larger NSF-funded research project in which we are integrating justice components throughout a first-year computing for engineers course. The revised course includes: (1) a weekly lab sociotechincal lab with small-group activities and discussions on curriculum-aligned real-world justice topics, (2) weekly post-lab readings and written reflections, (3) week-long modules where coding assignments are embedded in a justice topic, and (4) a final project that explicitly considers social impacts of a numerical analysis or design.

In this study, we analyze 135 students’ written reflection responses from five course sections during one semester, a total of 14 weeks. By analyzing these reflections, we aim to answer the following research questions: (1) How do students prioritize the social vs. technical aspects when discussing the impacts of technologies? (2) What language do students use to discuss the disparate impacts of technology? (3) How do these results vary across students who are part of different racial, ethnic, gender groups? (4) How do these results change over the course of the semester, and by weekly discussion topic?

We analyzed student written reflections using discourse analytic techniques. We iteratively coded student responses for evidence of attention to social aspects alone, technical aspects alone, and attending to the two simultaneously. We then coded the responses for specificity of language. Additionally, we disaggregated student self-identified demographic data to explore differences in language usage across racial, ethnic, and gender identities. Finally, we closely analyzed a small subset of responses to understand the implications of the across-course trends.

We found that students from minoritized backgrounds are more likely to explicitly refer to the groups harmed by technology, for example by using language such as “black women”, whereas white students tended to use more vague language, such as “increase diversity.” There is no notable trend over the course of the semester, but there are clear differences between different weeks. Students struggled the most with topics regarding racial justice, compared to topics regarding SES and gender, with considering the social and technical aspects of technology in unison. These results have implications for how to design sociotechnical activities for diverse classes of first-year engineering students.